Posted
by
timothy
on Friday July 25, 2008 @06:38PM
from the best-of-old-and-new dept.

Ubuntukitten writes "When some walls in Bocchignano near Roma started to erode, the perfect solution was found in Lego bricks (although some look suspiciously like Duplo bricks to me). FTA: 'At first I thought it would be a complicated procedure to fit the pieces, But as it turned out, the bigger plastic pieces were compatible with the smaller ones, and the Lego held itself in place without any glue whatsoever.' I like the effect. It's like the scene has been created on the holodeck but a few holoemitters are broken ..."

Speaking of your sig, it's LEGO, not legos. You can have a LEGO set or box, a single LEGO brick, or just a whole mess of LEGO. The capitalization ultimately doesn't matter and you can call it Lego or lego if you like. However, calling it "legos" is just wrong. That's about as ridiculous as "I love reading slashdots".

You are right. I've been suckered into using the vernacular. Although I must say... it seems that in the same way that the British add the letter "r" onto the end of some words Americans do the same with "s".

It did say it was temporary. Beautiful ancient relics is also disputable. TFA doesn't say that, these aren't ancient roman walls crumbling. Actually kind of looks like walls about a hundred years old in alleys that no one gives a crap about.

And given that apperantly every fucking teen in Europe must at some point spray paint his or her name across some public fixture, putting legos next to a crumbling wall is not bad.

Go to Italy. There are tons of ruins and ancient walls Bocchignano being fairly minor. When you goto important places like rome and venice you'll notice that most of it is graffitied. Some wall being legoed is the least of italy's problems when the Colosseum is being defaced regularly.

It's just a wall and the article never says anything about the antiquity of the wall. Nor do they look terribly beautiful. Did you look at the pictures? They look just like all the other stone walls found everywhere else.

Anyways, it's just a publicity stunt by some artist. I don't think the bricks are going to stay there long.

This isn't actually related to what this guy did, but real restorations often are purposefully "ugly" so that you can tell the difference between the original material, and the restoration. This is to preserve the historical record.

It is ghastly looking but the key is that they appear to be filling the hole and keeping the other stones from falling out of place. And more importantly, it's completely undo-able, which is an important value in any kind of preservation/restoration work dealing with relics.

With this ugly patch, its obvious what is old and new and it can be undone by just plucking them out.

Hopefully it's just a stop-gap with more significant repairs to follow that will be more aesthetically pleasing.

Personally I like it. It's something a bit interesting to look at and it's not like it's permanent.

I think people from the Americas need to realise that we're surrounded by this kind of thing here in Europe. I mean my uni accommodation in my first year was 14th or 15th century (we never found out which in the end), so was at least three hundred years older than the US itself.

1. Hmm, I dunno, I would think it depends more on whether the owner agreed to that kind of modification to their property. If the owners (or the city hall in the case of city property) actually agreed to have their walls repaired with Lego, or maybe in a sort of "doesn't matter with what" kinda contract, then it's ok. If not, it's still defacing someone else's property.

I mean, think of it this way: let's say your house showed some signs of water damage, or maybe (minor) cracks after an earthquake. And I c

While I don't like the look of mixing the Lego and Duplo with the old architecture, it is an interesting idea. A more structurally sound version of Lego could, one day, be the standard tool for patching damaged walls. If the Lego were designed to be rough on the sides, it might hold concrete render or skimcoat, so the finished product would be indistinguishable from the rest of a rendered or skimcoated wall.

I think it looks neat; reminiscent (to me) of those walls with shards of heavy wine bottles stucco'ed into the top as a makeshift intrusion deterrent. Europe is full of a mix of majestic architecture and ugly-hacks-through-the-ages, reflecting the materials and skillsets available at the time.

FTA: 'At first I thought it would be a complicated procedure to fit the pieces, But as it turned out, the bigger plastic pieces were compatible with the smaller ones, and the Lego held itself in place without any glue whatsoever.'

Actually this is what I think he means:But as it turned out, the [Duplo Blocks]...were compatible with the [lego blocks]...and the [whole thing]...held itself in place without any glue whatsoever."

I didn't think they were compatible until my younger brother started playing with duplo blocks and started playing around with them. Granted, this is when I was around 10, but without my sibling's interest I wouldn't have figured it out.

Most AFOL's [brickwiki.org] that I know would cringe at a chaotic color scheme like that. Sure, some might argue that it's art, but I think there's an at least as strong argument that it's also friggen ugly.

Is this what passes for a decent news article these days? Why is this kid "scouring the city?" Is it a college project? A city request? Boredom? Is it a permanent thing? An art installation? Did cement staop working? What is with the poor sentence structure?
This reads like gossip from a disinterested stoner.